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Color Magic in CS3? Take a look!
Hello. I recently saw a video clip where color was changed with “Color” in Final Cut Studio. Personally I use After effects for everything and don’t want Final Cut Studio for this. Is there a way to achieve these kind of results in After Effects CS3, either by itself or with plugins? I tried hue, saturation, curves, etc. I just cant get it to look anywhere as close to this good. Please see the before and after below. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
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9 Replies
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The easiest way I can think of to get results close to this in as little effort as possible would be to create an Adjustment Layer, add a Generate > Ramp effect, and switch the Adjustment Layer to the Overlay blending mode.
This, of course, is a simplified workflow, but it should give you some ideas about what you can do. Basically, you want to work with simple ramps/vignettes/feathered solids and blend modes. Curves and Levels are nice too.
In the example images you included above it looks like there is a gradient (ramp) that runs from dark at the top of the screen, to light at the center, to dark again at the bottom of the screen.
Global contrast is increased, which can be accomplished by using an effect such as curves, or duplicating the layer and setting the top instance to Overlay/Soft Light/Hard Light, or any other number of ways.
It looks like there was also a matte pulled for the red bike, and saturation/levels were increased.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
there are plenty of grading tools within AE to achieve this….but a great plugin suite that brings all the tools together and with a grading friendly interface try Magic Bullet Looks…..very nice feature set
Macpro Duel core 3Ghz
4.0G RAM
OS 10.4.10
QT 7.2
FCP 6.0.1
AE CS3
BMD Decklink HD Extreme 6.6
PAL Land -
I agree with the above reply’s (except for the magic bullet thing, I haven’t used it and can’t vouch for it). That level of color correction is a lot of masks, gradients, tracking masks, mattes, travel mattes, and a TON of finessing and playing around. I personally think the example here is extremely possible with AE. But it also helps when you use footage with at LEAST a 4:2:2 color space to start with. By the looks of it they used DVC pro HD footage. Keep in mind Color used to be a $25,000 color grading program, I forgot the name of it before Apple bought it, but there is a possiblity that it just might be a better program for color grading/correction than AE… maybe.
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[c1dumbkid] “But it also helps when you use footage with at LEAST a 4:2:2 color space to start with.”
A higher sampling rate for the chroma channels would only be ‘better’ in color grading if you’re performing operations using the channels themselves as mattes (and even then you should usually do some blurring/smoothing). I will agree that 4:2:2 footage always looks better than 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 to the critical eye, but most color adjustments won’t make 4:1:1/4:2:0 look any more worse than it already did… They still have all of the color information, just at a lower resolution.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
I am assuming you are speaking of Magic Bullet’s “Colorista” Has anyone had any experience with this?
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no magic bullet looks is a new application….far more advanced than colorista. Looks has all the mask and vingette options you need for advanced colour correction.
You can do most of what you want with the standard AE controls….Looks just puts them all in one place with a user friendly UI.
check out the free demo and tutuorial movies
Macpro Duel core 3Ghz
4.0G RAM
OS 10.4.10
QT 7.2
FCP 6.0.1
AE CS3
BMD Decklink HD Extreme 6.6
PAL Land -
Ok, thanks for that info. Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse is another app, thought a lot more expensive, I have been looking at. Does anyone have any experience with it?
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color finesse comes free bundled with AE….you can install it from your AE disks!
Macpro Duel core 3Ghz
4.0G RAM
OS 10.4.10
QT 7.2
FCP 6.0.1
AE CS3
BMD Decklink HD Extreme 6.6
PAL Land -
Sweet! That works. Thanks for everyones help!
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